On epistemology and ethical inquiry.
S.R.,
I’ve told you, before, of my music problem.
And it has reached such a height of moral turpitude that today I surreptitiously went down into the viscera of the city to buy an instrument secondhand. But while making my way through the cobbled streets I found myself at leisure, with no intention of consulting a map, and so preferred to be led by intuition, and a vague notion of where I was headed. I was in no rush to be anywhere at all.
I imagined, then, that I was making my way to Larissa.
“And if someone were to opine correctly what the way was [to Larissa], but had not been there himself nor knew the way, would he not also be able to lead others there correctly?”
Meno 97b1-2 (my translation)
There is a particularly pernicious problem presented by Meno in the eponymous dialogue of Plato’s, which in the literature is known as Meno’s Paradox:
As Meno himself puts it to Socrates:
“And in what way will you seek, Socrates, this thing which you do not know at all what sort of thing it is? For, what sort of thing of those things which you do not know will you propose to seek? Or, even if you happen upon it, how will you know that this is the thing which you did not know?”
Meno 80d5-7 (my translation)
The question is, essentially, a statement on the possibility of inquiry with respect to a particular set of questions (i.e., it cannot be adequately applied to questions which are empirically investigable, e.g., “how many words are in this essay?”), and a statement on the possibility of knowledge of a certain set of subjects. If we return to the theme of the dialogue, and couch the question in terms of virtue, we can rephrase and syncopate it thus:
How can we know what virtue is, if we do not know what virtue is, and how can we know that we know it?”
There are, it seems, two possibilities in terms of moral inquiry as stated above (Socrates addresses these in 80e):
1. Either we know what virtue is, in which case, if we know it, we don’t need to seek after it (what virtue is), because we know it–
2. Or, we don’t know what virtue is, in which case, how are we ever to know? Supposing we did engage in a successful investigation of virtue by example and definition, and were able to correctly identify whatever it is that virtue is, how would we know that we were correct?
In order to be able to find the thing we are looking for when we begin an inquiry, we must know what that thing is like, and so it seems that we fall either into the first camp, that we know what it is, or into an abyss of ignorance with no way out.
Prima facie, it seems that we are mired in the impossibility of moral progress, or at worst, the impossibility of moral knowledge/moral inquiry.
Meno has presented us with two possibilities as per knowledge of virtue, or, rather, as per knowledge regarding a particular set of questions, i.e., those which are not immediately empirically investigable–either we know, or we don’t know.
The problem, on one interpretation, rests on fallacious reasoning, insofar as Meno equivocates by means of the term “know”.
We might suppose that, contra this binary distinction between knowing and not knowing, that there actually exists a spectrum on which our beliefs fall. That is, any belief of mine that p (where p is some proposition that is truth-apt), might be interpreted as belonging to any single category of a series which lie between what we might call “total ignorance” and “knowledge”, where each gradation indicates a firmer or more substantial understanding of the subject.
This, however, only holds up if we can presuppose that we have known some analogous subject, correctly identify these states and how they appear regarding some subject, and that we can correctly transition between these supposed states on the road from ignorance to knowledge.
We might characterize this transition as the application of a procedure, and that some correct procedure may be applied to a new case, where we know this procedure as having been correctly applied to previous questions of a particular, non-empirical bent–but in such cases, as in the investigation of the term “virtue”, we are presupposing a kind of knowledge of the very thing, or very sort of thing, which we intend to inquire into, and so it appears that we are in a regress.
So, how do we find our way out of the labyrinth?
In the Meno, the proverbial spool of yarn is the doctrine of anamnesis. We don’t actually, as it were, acquire knowledge, we merely remember what we knew at a former time. This procedure we call education, and such a demonstration we find later in the dialogue, where Socrates leads Meno’s slave-boy through a geometric proof.
Now, in this context, there are several presuppositions which we might find unpalatable–recourse, for example, to the immortality of the soul, or metempsychosis, and yet, whether these are accepted (I do myself, but that is for another time), I find the doctrine of anamnesis a useful way out.
Let us, then, apply it to moral knowledge.
When prompted with the question, what is virtue, we might do, as Meno does, and point to particular kinds of virtue. There is, we can say, the virtue which characterizes a man, or a woman, or a child. This is not sufficient to answer the question, as these are merely examples, and it is not sufficient when prompted with the question of virtue itself to point to examples, as they all have something in common whereby they are instances of virtue. And so to come to an answer we must be able to pick out both the instances of a class, and the characteristic or set of characteristics common to these instances which indicate them as members of this class.
But this process of collection, and division, and enumeration, and delineation, relies on something like anamnesis. We already have a kind of vague familiarity with the thing which we intend to investigate. We may recognize this understanding through the knowledge of it that we have obtained through sense experience. We might call this vague knowledge intuition, which is a sort of latent propositional knowledge that undergirds our beliefs. It is this intuition which we investigate and refine in dialogue, and this intuition which allows us to have knowledge, or is, rather the foundation of knowledge.
In other words, we have a residual kind of knowledge of the sorts of things which we intend to investigate (this applies, at least, to those subjects of a non-empirical bent). We recognize, for example, the commonality of equal things, in so far as they are equal. And we recognize the commonality of beautiful things in so far as they are beautiful. And this recognition occurs even when we have encountered a thing only for the first time, say, a beautiful thing. We recognize it as being beautiful, even if we do not yet know what beauty is, and cannot put a name to beautiful. We can, in any case, put a face to it, when we see it.
And so, on to virtue.
If asked for good things, or good people, we might perhaps be able to point them out. This is a good starting point
We recognize the term virtue. It is, perhaps, depending on ability and on education, much like recognizing color, or understanding speech. Or, better yet, it is like relative pitch.
To the untrained ear, all notes, more or less, sound the same, say, on a guitar, or piano, or violin, or when sung. And yet, by and by, with exposure and intention, we come to recognize the je ne sais quoi of the note, which distinguishes it from other notes, and the same note in separate octaves. And something analogous happens in the case of virtue. We have some preliminary notion of moral goodness, or of goodness generally. And this simply is, and to it we are attuned, as we happen to be the sort of organisms endowed with the sort of faculties that we are. It is as natural and intelligible as it is for the eyes to see or the ears to hear.
This ability, it seems to me, seems to be much like these sense organs. We equally have intellectual organs which are attuned to these realities in the same way, and, equally, may be damaged or strengthened by the exercise of our will, or through chance. There is a kind of isomorphism between the world and what goes on inside our heads, or. Put another way, there is a kind of relationship between us and qualities out there in the world that allows us to understand them. Even if we cannot name them, we can recognize them, and this we possess even at the advent of our being.
So much for the possibility of knowledge. But what can be said of our moral intuitions?
And so, as I was making my way back home that morning, guitar on my back, no map in hand, I entertained these thoughts, and thought about this problem with which we are faced continually, as to the possibility of knowledge. I was bothered, still, by this question of virtue.
I also found, after some time, that I was lost.
But at least I had a new guitar.
Farewell.
Sincerely,
George